AFAIK there is no way to specify ‘cue points’ / ‘loop points’ in lossy compressible formats such as mp3 and ogg.

Personally I think it sucks, because it sure would be useful to specify these things inside the sound file. I guess I understand that you can’t neccessarily be exact about the cue points given that a lossy format might shift things around a bit or what not. So instead of just providing a best effort solution, we get nothing?

Now I’ve got to go and define some of these parameters by hand in some second datafile for each sound effect that needs looping points. It’s ugly and unhappy — espeically because there is now a very close data dependency between the meta-sample file and the sound file. If I happily muck with the sound file(s), my loop points in the meta-file will get out of sync in no time.

I’m sure you’ll tell me I’m wrong about all this, and give me the information I need to use user definable cue points in lossy sound formats. Of course then I’d need to know a sound / sample utility that can actually place such cue points into the data files, and of course you’d mention a few for me.